Update: More Details on MediaNews And Press+

Yesterday we reported on MediaNews’ trial of Steve Brill’s JournalismOnline pay wall platform Press+, which seeks a way for writers to maybe one day get paid for Internet reporting. Today, new details have emerged about the experiment, which will launch on two of MediaNews newspaper websites — York Daily Records and the Enterprise-Record — and which VP for content development Howard Saltz has already compared to The Financial Times pay model. So which content will we be coughing it up for in the future?

In this new arena, original journalism is placed at a premium. So if you want to view the stuff that “bloggers and Web enthusiasts couldn’t do,” you’ll be forced to pay the tentative subscription price of $3.99. “If someone robbed a bank, that’s in front of the wall,” Saltz said. “The story of how bank robberies increase when the economy goes bad, behind the wall.”

Readers can register without paying and read up to 25 articles for free a month, which is a large-scale version of what The Financial Times and Variety have already capped at a daily basis.

It’s an interesting concept: putting the essentially aggregated news that a site needs to keep up with the blogs ahead of the pay wall, and keeping the original content behind it. And there’s also no fear of losing link love here, as long as you let non-subscribers read a certain amount of paid content for free. But we’re still not sure on Saltz’s bold claim that this system will grow traffic, as so far no model has been able to both enforce a pay wall and keep advertisers happy with the amount of readership. What do you think?